Judge orders U.S. to keep custody of migrants amid claims they were sent to South Sudan

A federal court ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to maintain custody of migrants on a deportation flight that immigrants’ lawyers said was headed to South Sudan, a transfer the judge said appeared to violate an injunction he issued in April.

“I am not going to order that the plane turn around,” said Judge Brian E. Murphy of the U.S. District Court in Boston. Instead, he said, any migrants in Department of Homeland Security custody must not leave U.S. control once the plane landed, at least until a hearing Wednesday to determine whether they had received adequate due process.

The order capped a tumultuous hearing hastily called by the judge, during which Trump officials said they could not say where the flight was or where it was going.

Murphy repeatedly expressed concerns that the administration had violated his order not to deport immigrants to countries where they are not from and may face danger without giving them enough time to challenge their removal. And he warned that officials involved in the deportations who were aware of his order, including potentially the pilots of the plane, could face criminal sanctions. “Based on what I have been told,” he said, “this seems like it may be contempt.”

The question of whether the Trump administration defied his previous order added to the remarkable series of faceoffs it has had with the judicial system as President Donald Trump has aggressively pursued his promises of mass deportations. In case after case, judges have rebuked the administration for not allowing adequate due process, and Trump officials in turn have questioned the authority of courts to hear such disputes and even called for the impeachment of judges who rule against it.

Immigration lawyers at the hearing Tuesday said at least two migrants had been told they were going to be deported to South Sudan, a violence-plagued country in Africa that the State Department advises Americans not to travel to.

After a break in the proceedings to gather information, a lawyer for the Justice Department, Elianis N. Perez, said that one of the migrants, who is Burmese, was returned home to Myanmar, not South Sudan. But she declined to say where the second migrant, a Vietnamese man, was deported, saying it was classified information. It was unclear how many other migrants might be on that deportation flight.

“Where is the plane?” Murphy asked.

“I’m told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified,” Perez said. She said the government had not violated any court orders because the man had not claimed to be fearful of removal.

Murphy asked what authority the government was using to classify the location of the deportation flight. “I don’t have the answer to that,” she responded.

After a second break, Joseph N. Mazzara, the Homeland Security Department’s acting general counsel, said that he was not sure whether the information was classified but that he did not know the plane’s current location in any event.

Earlier in the hearing, lawyers from the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project had said they had been told Monday that a client of theirs, the man from Myanmar, was informed that he would be deported to South Sudan. When the lawyers checked on the man Tuesday, they said, they were told that he had already been deported. Elsewhere, they said, a Vietnamese man “appears to have suffered the same fate.”

They said they wanted Murphy to demand that the Trump administration return the migrants. The lawyers included a pair of documents in the filing, including one Department of Homeland Security document that listed South Sudan as the removal destination for one of the immigrants.

“This morning, they learned from a detention officer via email that N.M.,” the migrant from Myanmar, “was removed this same morning to South Sudan,” the lawyers said.

In response to that claim, Murphy said he believed it was likely a violation of his previous order issued in April, when he directed the Trump administration not to deport immigrants to countries other than their own without first giving them 15 days’ notice to raise concerns that they might face danger there.

Murphy later said that if N.M. was in fact removed to Myanmar rather than South Sudan, his deportation may not have violated his April order. But he still told the administration to be prepared Wednesday to address the details of his removal.

The chaotic hearing Tuesday carried echoes of another one in March, presided over by Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington. Boasberg ordered that planes carrying Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador turn around. They did not. Unlike the migrants in Boasberg’s case, who were deported using the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime law, the plaintiffs in the case before Murphy have a “final order of removal,” meaning their status has already been considered by an immigration court.

Murphy’s April order has already been the subject of much dispute with the Trump administration.

On Friday evening, a federal appeals court that sits over Murphy had rejected the Justice Department’s request to put the ruling on hold as the administration sought to challenge it. And immigration lawyers have asked Murphy several times to enforce his order on the Trump administration.

Last month, the lawyers claimed that four men were sent from a U.S. naval base in Cuba to El Salvador without proper notice. And earlier this month, they raised alarms to Murphy that the administration was planning to deport a group of immigrants to Libya without sufficient notice.

Murphy warned the government that the flight to Libya would have violated his order, as well.

“If there is any doubt – the court sees none – the allegedly imminent removals, as reported by news agencies and as plaintiffs seek to corroborate with class-member accounts and public information, would clearly violate this court’s order,” he wrote.

Over the weekend, the lawyers raised another concern, saying that a Guatemalan man had been sent to Mexico without proper notice or a chance to express his fears about being sent there.

After initially claiming that the man had in fact been told that he was being flown to Mexico, the administration abruptly reversed itself, acknowledging that it could not find any officials who had in fact given the man the proper notice.

The hearing scheduled for Wednesday before Murphy will consider his claims as well.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.